Sublime

Though Peter Turchin is working on it. See his monograph War and Peace and War. Then look at Ray Dalio’s Principles for a Changing World Order, Strauss and Howe’s The Fourth

What we need is a synthetic theory that encompasses both demographic mechanisms (with the associated economic consequences) and power relations (surplusextraction mechanisms).

“feudal lust for expanded revenue”

States are not simply created and manipulated by dominant classes; they are agents in their own right, and they compete with the elites in appropriating resources from the economy.

for a new secular cycle to get going, the pressures of the general population on resources and of the elites on commoners must be substantially reduced from their precrisis levels.

The declining incomes of the majority of aristocrats have two important consequences: intensifying oppression of the peasants by the elites and increasing intraelite competition for scarce resources.

It is curious that both sides in the Brenner debate almost entirely ignored the role of the state.

Our explicit focus is on agrarian societies, that is, those in which more than 50 percent of the population (and typically above 80–90 percent) is involved in agriculture.